Posted on 04/09/2002 5:40:44 AM PDT by GailA
Fast-Tracker Hits Stride at U of M 12-year-old finally finds a challenge
By Ruma Banerji banerji@gomemphis.com April 9, 2002
Alex Brueggeman is matter-of-fact about his genius.
"I'm different, but I'm still a person," the 12-year-old University of Memphis sophomore says, lounging comfortably in the U of M library.
This month, Alex became the youngest person ever to snare the prestigious Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship. This year's award went to 309 cream-of-the-crop science, engineering and math college students from across the country. Because Alex won it in his sophomore year, the scholarship will pay tuition, fees, books, and room and board up to a maximum of $7,500 per year for his junior and senior years.
Alex has the intellectual ability of a gifted 24-year-old, and it shows when he talks about his plans to work with plant genetics and rid the environment of toxins.
But then, ever so subtly, a glimmer of youth surfaces. The freckle-faced kid enjoys being silly. Alex draws "nornors," modified stick-figure cartoons with enlarged hands and feet, on the graphing calculator he needs for calculus. He's also conspiring with a college friend on the perfect way to startle his professors.
"It's going to be funny," he says, with a lopsided smile.
"Alex has that neat mix of 12-year-old enthusiasm with the intelligence of a young man," says Jack Grubaugh, Alex's academic adviser in biology. "He's very well adjusted, socially and academically."
Alex, the only child of neurosurgeon Dr. Michael Brueggeman and professional artist Gay McCarter, has taken an unconventional path in an educational age that pushes the mainstreaming of students who differ from the norm.
His parents took him out of school when he was 6, after realizing Alex's growing educational needs could not be met in a traditional classroom. "He would come home angry and frustrated," his mother says.
"He wasn't getting enough. And when I would go to the school and talk with the principals and tell them he needed more, they would politely tell me my son was not different and that I was just one of those parents who wanted my son to be seen as different."
McCarter began home-schooling Alex. She hired tutors, subscribed to various curricula for gifted children, and enrolled him in some distance-learning programs for gifted youth associated with Stanford and Northwestern universities.
Alex whizzed through the material and needed more. He found worksheets with the home-schooling material boring. He yearned for a challenge.
"He needed that one-on-one contact with a professor and that interaction and competition with other students," McCarter says.
The family lives in Jackson, Tenn., so she enrolled Alex in Jackson State Community College. Alex was 9 at the time, and admissions officials were wary about whether such a young boy could handle the academic and social pressures in college.
The college took five months to accept Alex, McCarter says, asking for various documentation from proof of Alex's IQ to transcripts of his work for Northwestern and Stanford.
He enrolled in the college's Spanish II class, did well, and ultimately was elected as the Spanish Club's treasurer. He continued at the community college, taking biology.
Later, he enrolled in Lambuth University, where he took English composition, college algebra and trigonometry so he could rack up enough credit hours to qualify as a transfer student.
But Alex was interested in research, so McCarter approached the University of Memphis.
Gloria Moore, associate director for admissions, says Alex was accepted as a transfer student since he had at least 15 credit hours from another college or university and well over the required 2.0 grade point average.
"We didn't make any special changes for him," Moore says. "We just made sure he had the right number of credits and admitted him like any other transfer student."
Alex enrolled at the U of M last fall, when he was 11. He's a commuter student, spending three hours a day riding back and forth between Jackson and Memphis with his mother.
While he attends class, his mother works on her art projects in hallways outside the classroom. The inconvenience is a small price to pay for the independence and educational challenge Alex gets at the university, she says.
Alex is taking 18 credit hours this semester. He is a biology major and a chemistry minor and hopes to finish his undergraduate work and master's degree at the university by the time he's 16.
Until now, McCarter had been reluctant to talk about her son, not because she wasn't proud, but because she feared Alex's gift would be misunderstood.
"People don't know what to think about people like Alex," McCarter says.
"Most gifted kids become underachievers, not because they lose their talent, but because they're forced to stay in an environment that's not giving them what they need.
"Alex is an example of what can happen if you believe in a profoundly gifted child's ability and let him or her explore what they can do," McCarter says.
Alex sat quietly and listened to his mother. He says he has little to add, except that he's grateful the university accepted him. His mother hopes Alex's story increases the public's awareness of the needs of gifted children, but Alex has another goal in mind: coaxing his mother into letting him live on campus.
For Alex, it's a somewhat frustrating tug-of-war for independence.
McCarter gently tells him no, his "judgment isn't fully baked" and he's still "a child."
"Don't call me that," he says.
"OK, sorry, young man," she adjusts.
"It's hard to let him go," she says softly. "There aren't a lot of parents who'd be comfortable letting their 12-year-old child go off to college."
It's interesting that there is only one reference to this kid's dad in the whole article.
There's more to life than work and school, that's for sure, and there's no rush to get the necessary education out of the way. But there's also no need to squander the extra decade this kid will have on his peers. When they are finished "finding themselves" in their mid-twenties in college, they can submit their applications for employment in his company.
I think you're a very wise lady. I was never genius level, but I was smarter than most kids my age, and definitely a few years more advanced than they were. My parents, by homeschooling, helped keep me from getting either lazy or arrogant - I know I have tendencies toward each, but I have to ask myself what I would be like if I had attended a school where almost all the other kids were slower, and the material didn't challenge me at all. I was ready for college at 16, and fortunately had the emotional maturity to handle it. And better yet, I had a childhood. Sounds like your son will be the same way (but then I already know you're a great mom!)
Thank you! I can always depend on you for encouragement!
I'm convinced that teenage angst is caused by the environment at school and popular culture and is not a natural part of becoming an adult. I'm equally convinced that homeschooling is the best way to educate children. I've found that homeschooled teens are much more mature than their peers.
By the time he's 16, he will probably be at the local university taking calculus and music theory classes. In the meantime, we try to enjoy him and his siblings because they truly are a joy to us.
Sounds like you've handled your child very well.
That's one of the many benefits of homeschooling. OTOH, I wish my parents had freed me from violin lessons and let me go outside to play street hockey. 8o)
My thing was art, and I wish I had been homeschooled and had been able to pursue it at an earlier age. I hated the get-in-touch-with-your-feelings school "art" classes. I wanted someone to teach me how to draw! I wound up learning on my own during and after college and now have a thriving career as an illustrator.
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